Once again autumn is upon us and people are out in droves trying to capture that perfect autumn photograph. I read something along these lines frequently in forums and galleries, "I wish the Sun would come out so my autumn pictures would be brighter.", or, "No matter how many pictures I take the color just isn't as vibrant as it looks in person." The scene is entirely up to you, but I'm here to lend a hand in enhancing that picture and making it stand out in a crowd. I use Photoshop, but most any decent photo editing software will have the features needed to do this very simple procedure.

Open the image up and find the feature to adjust saturation. (Ctrl+U in Photoshop)Slide the saturation up between 20% to 40%. Use your eye to get the results you want.

In Photoshop To add a little flare slide the hue ever so slightly towards the left, about -5 seems to do it for me most of the time. This will make the oranges and reds pop to amazing effect.

Just be careful while adjusting these settings. Overdoing it will cause contrast issues and the image will start to look faked or "shopped". We want to "shop" our images but leave the impression that they were not "shopped". Here's a before and after to see how much a difference this can make.

This is the raw image from my Pentax DSLR (resized to 800 x 536)

And this is the image after adjusting the hue and saturation to make it pop